The 10 most effective platforms to measure & improve the employee experience

Employee retention is currently the number one priority for human resources and operations teams.* Organizations need to look for ways to improve the employee experience (EX) in all areas. Many employees cite transparent performance review processes, opportunities to take ownership and develop their skills, and regular learning opportunities among the top reasons they stay at their current company.**

This means that rather than focusing exclusively on designing initiatives around compensation and benefits, employers should be taking a more holistic approach, looking to improve the employee lifecycle across all relevant touchpoints, from onboarding to offboarding.

Multi-featured, comprehensive EX software can help your leaders address the complex nature of the employee lifecycle, allowing them to implement new employee experience strategies, streamline processes, and track outcomes with sophisticated analytics.

To see a marked improvement in your employee experience, we’ve compiled this list of the top ten EX software solutions, exploring key features, benefits, and pricing for each.

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*Gallagher, 2023

**Leapsome, 2023

Disclaimer: The information below is based on our research in 2023. All user feedback referenced in the text has been sourced from independent software review platforms such as G2 and Capterra in July-August 2023.

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Companies

Pricing

Language options

Customer rating

Leapsome

Starts at US$8 per user per month when billed monthly

13

4.8

Bonusly

Bonusly (Experience)

Starts at US$3 per user per month when billed monthly

4

4.8

Cornerstone

Cornerstone (Experience)

Cornerstone pricing isn’t readily available.

50

3.9

GoodHabitz

GoodHabitz (Experience)

Pricing depends on size of organization.

9

n/a

Personio

Personio (Experience)

Personio pricing isn’t readily available

6

4.3

Jira

Jira (Experience)

Plans start at US$10 per user per month.

5

4.3

Monday.com

Monday.com (experience)

Free plan available. Paid plans start at US$10/month per user billed monthly.

14

4.7

Notion

Notion (Experience)

Free plan available. Paid plans start at US$10 per user per month.

4

4.7

Slack

Slack (Experience)

Free plan available. Paid plans start at US$8.75 per user per month.

1

4.5

Zendesk

Zendesk (Experience)

Pricing starts at $25 per user per month when billed monthly

41

4.3

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Workleap Officevibe (Surveys)

Workleap’s pricing is undisclosed. Officevibe offers a free plan for small teams and paid plans from US$5 p.p./mo.

2

4.6

Key features to look for in your EX software

With the right employee experience software, you can create a more aligned, collaborative, and results-driven company culture. While investigating which tool is right for your business, look for features like:

Customization

The more flexible and versatile a platform is, the simpler it will be for teams to adapt it to their business’s unique processes.

Detailed analytics

In-depth reporting and analytics help you easily navigate employee responses and make more unbiased, data-driven decisions.

Intuitive interface

An easily navigable user interface makes it easier for employees to learn how to use the software and start utilizing it every day.

Interconnectedness

Well-connected features allow for more data sharing between different modules, resulting in more seamless workflows.

Scalability

Growing businesses requires scalable software to handle company changes and transitions and the increase in data, users, and process improvements.

Integrations

Reduce team workload and improve the employee experience with a platform that syncs with the tools you already use for communication and project management.

Unlock what’s unique to your employee experience

Leapsome is intuitive and highly customizable, helping you streamline your EX processes to fit your specific needs.

Request a Demo

^1.Leapsome

With its seven well-integrated modules, Leapsome can help you improve your people enablement processes, address multiple aspects of the employee journey, and slim down your tech stack. It also makes it easier for organizations to collaborate asynchronously, stay aligned with their goals, support employees on their development and career progression, and stay resilient in times of transition.

Our seven modules are:

You can start by using one or two modules on their own and scale over time, which is perfect for growth-oriented companies new to people enablement and employee experience software. However, Leapsome is a highly interconnected platform, so modules work best if used together.

A screenshot of a positive review from a Leapsome customer.

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Key features

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Automated onboarding and exit surveys
Performance and 360-degree reviews with cross-cycle analytics‍‍
Competency frameworks‍
Anonymous engagement and pulse survey tools and templates with automatic action plan recommendations and sentiment analysis for open-ended questions
Instant feedback feature that allows for public praise and private feedback
Anonymous Q&A board that lets employees ask high-level questions and get answers from leadership‍
1:1s and team meeting templates ‍
Compensation and promotion tools ‍
Built-in learning platform ‍
ISO 27001 compliance ‍
Multilingual interface

Pros

All-in-one approach
Available in 13 languages
Consistently growing and adding new features

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cons

Due to the variety of features some inital training may be required

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Trusted By:

“There are a lot of incredible tools on the market, but Leapsome is the only one that interconnects its features so deeply and provides the right level of customisation. It’s a tool that integrates into your culture — and not a tool you have to mold your culture and processes to.”

Lauren Gomes

Head of People Experience

Read case study

^2.Bonusly

Bonusly offers peer-to-peer recognition features, where every employee receives a certain amount of points they can put toward recognizing their peers. Recognition recipients can then use those points to collect rewards like gift cards, cash-out options, charitable donations, and other customized options, also offered through Bonusly’s platform.

Bonusly also allows you to automate employee rewards for personal and company milestones as well as your incentive and referral programs.
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Key features
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Peer-to-peer recognition tools
Customizable employee rewards
Automated milestone tracking
Tools for designing incentive and referral programs
Analytics and reporting

Pros

Slack and Microsoft Teams integration
straightforward UI

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cons

Reportedly the software can be quite slow

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^3. Cornerstone

Cornerstone is a solid solution for companies that want to make their learning and development opportunities more personalized to employee needs. You can build a skills profile for each employee, gathered from their extensive database. Managers can then tag the relevant Cornerstone-curated learning content based on the competencies employees need to develop, which means team members aren’t wasting their time on unnecessary training.

Cornerstone also includes performance management, recruiting and onboarding, and employee data management software among its suite of products, allowing you to support employees throughout multiple phases of their tenures.
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Key features
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Built-in learning management system (LMS)
Skills graphs and individualized employee skills profiles
Performance management system
Recruiting and onboarding software
Core HR system for employee data management

Pros

Powerful data visualization features
Great for fully remote onboarding processes
Generates positive feedback from learners

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cons

A lot of backend set up required
Not very customizable

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^4. GoodHabitz

GoodHabitz is an online training and learning platform offering the hard and soft skills training that companies need to stay agile and competitive. From digital skills and language courses to well-being and time management training, GoodHabitz has an extensive library of content that employees can access and share with their colleagues.

The platform also helps you reinforce learning with assessments and WorkOuts, which are group assignments employees can do during working hours. This way, employees aren’t only receiving training, but they’re also staying actively involved in the process with discussions and feedback.
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Key features
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Catalog of learning and training courses
Assessments and group assignment tools
Analytics and reporting.

Pros

currently no user reviews available

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cons

currently no user reviews available

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^5. Personio

A platform dedicated to core HR and talent management, Personio is designed to help human resource teams manage employee data and keep up-to-date records so they can smoothly onboard and offboard team members. At the same time, self-service portals means employees don’t have to rely on managers if they want to update their information, request time off, view their pay stubs, and take part in 360-degree performance reviews.
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Key features
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Recruiting and onboarding tools
Applicant tracking and sourcing
Offboarding tools
Payroll
Time tracking
Absence management
Digital employee file database
Performance management
Training courses

Pros

Highly configurable
Offers a lot of integrations
Offers analytics and real-time insights

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cons

No security certifications such as ISO 27001 or SOC2
Reportedly customer service is difficult to reach
Reported buggy interface and unintuitive design
Expensive option for the features provided and hidden costs

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^6. Jira

The Atlassian product Jira isn’t just for software development teams working on coding jobs anymore. With its project management tool, any team can manage and track crucial projects, changing the template view based on their needs. For example, the HR team can use it to manage candidates, and the design team can use it to organize their tasks and assets.

Jira also has specific products for simplifying software development, supporting service and customer-facing teams, and keeping your tech and business teams connected on strategy, which makes it an excellent fit for enterprise-level software and design companies.
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Key features
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Project management tools and dashboards
Customer service team support software
Software development project management tools
Strategic alignment features

Pros

Highly customizable
Variety of plugins
Good support team

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cons

Difficult to navigate and can feel over-engineered
steep learning curve
Slow and clunky UI

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^7. monday.com

Even though it's not formally EX software, monday.com can help you improve the employee experience with dashboards for tracking objectives and key results, allowing team members to see how their work contributes to broader company goals. Moreover, because it's easy for anyone to create tasks and manage assignments with Kanban boards and Gantt charts, monday.com empowers team members to take more ownership of business-critical projects.
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Key features
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Project and task management templates
Goals and strategy dashboards
Customer relationship management software for sales teams
Spring and bug-tracking software for development teams

Pros

Simple, ready-made templates
Good value
Useful for projects of any size

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cons

Some users report that it runs slowly

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^8. Notion

As remote work becomes the norm, Notion’s collaborative online workspace platform has become increasingly popular among companies of all sizes. Notion makes onboarding, training, and knowledge management easier with Wikis that allow you to create central resource hubs. With project management tools, the platform is also helpful for teams that need to collaborate on creative initiatives, strategies, and tasks.

For businesses embracing AI, Notion also offers a generative AI writing assistant to help teams brainstorm, summarize, and plan.
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Key features
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Customizable workspaces for keeping projects and knowledge bases separate and organized
Shareable notes and documents that allow you to upload various types of content and media
Structured pages and subpages for organizing information
Templates for taking meeting notes, tracking projects, and making to-do lists
Integrated AI writing assistant

Pros

New AI integration makes managing projects easier
Good for mind mapping and team collaboration
Versatile and ideal for creative projects

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cons

Learning curve for new users
Too many shared documents can overwhelm the interface

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^9. Slack

Slack has become more than a faster alternative to email — with Huddles, Clips, and file-sharing functions, it’s now an essential tool for remote, hybrid, and in-office teams that need to collaborate and make decisions with greater agility. It’s also fantastic for informing employee experience initiatives, because it’s with built-in tools for polls and surveys that you can use to gather quick feedback from team members.

Slack also integrates with a plethora of third-party calendar tools and software for people enablement, project management, and customer support platforms, eliminating the need for team members to constantly toggle between different apps.
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Key features
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Customizable channels for specific projects
Individual and group messaging
Huddles for audio and video calling
Clips tools for recording and sharing videos
File sharing

Pros

Interface is easy to use
Facilitates both written conversations and audio/video calls

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cons

Huddles can’t be recorded
Can become a distraction if left unchecked

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^10. Zendesk

While Zendesk is primarily a customer support and service platform designed to help client-facing teams manage and resolve customer issues, it's unexpectedly useful for improving the employee experience. Zendesk allows you to build product knowledge bases you can leverage for onboarding and training. You can also use the platform to set up an internal help desk where employees submit requests for IT and questions for HR.

Finally, Zendesk’s analytics also makes it easier for you to track the efficiency of your internal processes, enabling you to adjust them for increased productivity.
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